If ever there was a tragedy that underlined the national mood, it was this inferno

It’s summer drinks party season in west London: but the parties are muted, and there’s an air of faint embarrassment that the champagne corks are popping in the shadow of Grenfell Tower. The wealthy are feeling guilty: there are buckets for donations in the hall, and the ladies who lunch have become the ladies who sort out donations of clothes and other essentials at local churches.

If ever there was a tragedy that underlined the national mood, it was this inferno. What the general election swing to Jeremy Corbyn validated was his core belief that our society is grotesquely unequal and somehow rigged in favour of rich and powerful individuals and corporations. And what starker illustration of that could there have been than a human catastrophe of a kind that simply could not have happened to the sort of families at the summer drinks parties, and yet was so likely to happen to the residents of the tower block at the end of the street that they even predicted it?